We have everything to hide and nothing to hide. We kiss behind a pew. It is chaste but not chaste, does this make sense? Likely not. But this is my dream.

I can't sort out what it all means. I cannot tell you what it all means because to do so would be perhaps to tip my hand too much or more or worse perhaps, to jump the gun and speak of that which I do not really know. I do know that I looked all of these things up on Google and discovered all manner of things, all of them good. Pears, orchards, gardens, ripe fruit, apples, ripe pears - and while many of these things relate to my real life, some of them do not and so leave me with a great mystery.

And so it is that I asked my mother today for a family heirloom. She has a big book that dates back to 1919 and is called The Book of White Magic and while it is not the sort of book I would normally turn to, with such dreams and with such frequency, I feel I have no choice but to turn to some source (hey, I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours, one of my favorite lines of all -which Dylan changes from time to time, but that's okay).

I remember seeing this book as a child and wondering what it was all about and watching as my mother and her best friend would trace the fine lines of text with their fingers in the text and then count back the pages to the "answer." I recall how the answer was always the right answer. More than anything, what I remember is that the book was always right. Not like Magic 8 Ball right, that you could fit into any slot, but right in the sense that you just knew that the book had you pegged.

It was like when you were a kid and you'd been doing something you shouldn't have and were then "caught," like a kid with his or her hand in the cookie jar, hands and mouth sticky with tart au miel. It was forbidden to touch this ancient book for myriad reasons: for one it was old and likely valuable and second, it was and is a book of great mystery and one a child simply had no business touching, at least, that was the consensus in my family whenever I tried to touch the book or go near it. I could sometimes ask a question and the grown-ups would humor me by asking the book (again, even as a child, the book was always right, so that tells me something).